


zero one one zero one one (while you count clouds)

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a softer animorphs [11]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, First Meetings, Gen, Marshall Jake Berenson, Ranger Rachel Berenson, Science Bros Marco and Ax, Spoilers for Book 23, yes meghan that tag is especially for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 21:36:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12968889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: When you’re around I don’t know how to hide my feelings.  I count in binary, in my head.  zero one one zero one one and you count clouds. (while you count clouds)The war with the kaiju has dragged on far longer than anyone had hoped, and the old guard of the PPDC is long dead.  The children of the war are the last ones standing.In which the San Francisco Shatterdome's Marshal is the youngest in history, there are too few Rangers to fill the Jaegers, and Rachel needs a partner.





	zero one one zero one one (while you count clouds)

**Author's Note:**

> Still not dead!
> 
> So today my phone kicked the bucket right and proper, and it's been a long week full of broken sinks, bathtubs with mold colonies, and a distinct lack of edible food in the house. I'm very depressed after the whole mess, so I yanked this out of the depths of my Softer Animorphs document and decided it was done enough to be going on with.
> 
> I haven't decided if this will have additional chapters or parts or whatever, but I guess we'll see. Cassie doesn't appear in this, but she runs LOCCENT, of course.

The San Francisco Shatterdome was the fifth one Tobias had ever lived in, and after a certain point, they were all the same.  

New arrivals to Shatterdomes were always a fascination, from the loftiest Ranger to some random cook, but Tobias was in the somewhat unique position of being entirely useless.  He was here on sufferance for the sake of his family—in memoriam, really.

It had been twelve years since Galaxy Tree was destroyed with both of her pilots, and Tobias and Ax had floated from one Dome to another ever since as a sort of living memorial.  After all, the PPDC had practically raised the pair of them—Tobias had literally been born in a Shatterdome, a year before Arbron had died from exposure to kaiju blood and grounded Elfangor for a while.  Loren had taken Arbron’s place two years later, and Elfangor had gone back to war with Galaxy Tree and a new partner, and Tobias had been more or less raised by LOCCENT, along with Ax—where else could Ax go, when his parents were killed, other than to his older brother.  When Galaxy Tree fell for good, taking down a kaiju outside Manzanillo, the PPDC couldn’t abandon them.  Until Ax finished his degree and leveraged the Shamtul name into an actual job, they had been children of the war, the _de facto_ wards of the marshals. 

Now they were in San Francisco, and Tobias didn’t even have Ax with him, because Ax was a physics and tech genius of an unnatural kind, and had real things to do.

Tobias, mostly, did whatever anyone needed him to do.  Today, it was running messages, because the jury-rigged phone lines were down (again), but Shatterdomes stopped for nothing, and the local Marshal—the last Marshal—was back.

“Hey, can you tell me where the Marshal is?” Tobias asked, stepping up to the fast moving group of officials.  Mostly younger people, because the PPDC was mostly younger people at this point.  They’d burned through their staff like lightning, losing people left and right to disaster or illness or radiation poisoning or kaiju attacks, and the next generation down had stepped up to take their place. 

“Yeah,” said one of the men at the center of the cluster, and shouldered past the others to reach Tobias.  “What do you need?”

Tobias edited his estimation down—the guy was exactly twenty four if Tobias remembered his profile correctly, but he looked older, worn and a little ragged, with the sharp-edged look of someone under more stress than he could take.  It was a familiar look, these days, in the last Shatterdome.  Tobias held up one of the two folders to demonstrate, tucking the other under his arm.  “These are the latest specs on the repairs to Ursa Flight, I was told to bring them to the Marshal.”

“Right,” the guy said with a sigh, and held out a hand.  “I’ll take them.” 

“With all due respect, they’re supposed to go to the Marshal.”

“Yeah, they are,” the guy confirmed.  “So you can give them to me.”  Tobias kept his face very still, but the guy— _Marshal_ Jacob Berenson, then—smiled a little anyway as he took the file.  “Trust me, no one’s more upset about it than I am.  If my brother was here--”  Marshal Berenson broke off mid-word, a familiar flicker of pain across the unfamiliar face.  The Berenson Boys had piloted Tigress Gold for three years until Tom Berenson was murdered by the local branch of the kaiju cult, and left his brother without a partner.  The Marshal collected himself well, blinked away the thought and said ruefully, “If Marshal Chapman wasn’t dead, I’d kill him myself.  You’re new, right?  I grew up here,” he added, gesturing to the Shatterdome.  “I know everyone, especially these days.”

Tobias nodded, slowly.  “Yeah—yes sir, my brother and I just got here a week ago.  From the Hong Kong Shatterdome, before it closed down.”

Marshal Berenson nodded.  “I’ve been.  My cousin and I dropped from there once, when her partner was out of commission.  And you can drop the sir, everyone here just calls me Jake.”  He frowned thoughtfully at Tobias and added, “Have we met before?”

“No, si—Jake,” Tobias corrected himself.  “I’m Tobias.  You probably knew my parents, at least in passing, though, if you grew up in the PPDC.”  When this didn’t produce an immediate response, Tobias gestured vaguely toward his shoulder, where Galaxy Tree’s star was tattooed in black ink under his shirt, and said, “Elfangor and Loren Shamtul.  Everyone says I look like them.”

“Right,” Jake said, another smile breaking over his face, and Tobias was a little taken aback at how young it made him look.  “You and your…I didn’t know you had a brother?  You’re both Shatterdome kids too, aren’t you?  There’s a few of us here.”

“Oh,” Tobias said, startled into a smile of his own.  He had gotten used to a little bit of a starry-eyed reaction—but then, the Berenson Boys had been the darlings of the California Coast, homegrown heroes who had taken Tigress out for the first time when Jake was barely seventeen.  Their ocean-hopping cousin, Rachel, was the last surviving Ranger for Ursa Flight.  The family was almost as famous as the Shamtuls.  And besides, Shatterdome kids were a class to themselves.  “Yeah, we are.  Dad got custody of Ax when he was five, and I’ve always lived in the ‘domes.  Ax is actually Dad’s brother, but he’s only a year older than me.  He’s your new math guy, he’s a genius,” Tobias added, proud.

“Ax— _that’s_ what’s bothering Marco,” Jake said, shaking his head.  “Right.  Listen, Tobias, I’ve got to run and it looks like you do too, but you and Ax should come find us in the mess hall.”

“Us?” Tobias asked as Jake started to flick through the folder.

“The Shatterdome kids,” Jake said.  “There are six of us, now.”  He offered a vague salute with the Ursa folder as he walked away, trailing the small entourage behind him.

The other folder was destined for Jake’s cousin, the last Ranger Berenson.  It wasn’t from Ax.

Tobias hadn’t looked inside, but he knew what it would contain.

The Ursa Flight debacle had hit every news station in the world like a sledgehammer, barely a month before.  An argument in favor of the coastal wall, against the Jaegar program.  In the middle of a battle, Iniss, the biggest Category IV on record, had ripped open Ursa’s Conn-Pod and torn one of her pilots out, killing her on the spot and leaving her other pilot alone.  Melissa Chapman’s body had been found washed up on the tide of kaiju blue, degraded almost down to the bone by the acid of the blood, and Rachel Berenson had been stonefaced at the televised funeral. 

They didn’t have time to mourn.  A month was enough time to recover most of a pilot’s Drift capability after a neural overload, that was one thing that they had learned well during the disastrous first months of testing.

The file in Tobias’ hands contained a list of possible Drift partners for the open seat in Ursa Flight’s Conn-Pod.

It was a very thin file.

Tobias, on instinct, didn’t bother to look for Rachel Berenson in her quarters.  Instead, he took two flights of stairs down to the lowest level, and followed signs in English and Spanish to the gym.  The sound of someone beating the shit out of a punching bag—with a staff, Tobias thought—reached him before he had even turned the final corner.

Tall and lean, long golden hair tied up in a ponytail—for a moment Tobias felt something in his chest seize.  Panic flooded bitter over the back of his tongue.  But then the figure twisted into a blow and he saw her face.  Familiar, but from magazine covers and television screens—not Taylor.

Racehl Berenson had always been in the news, ever since her Jaeger first dropped.  Ursa Flight had been renowned for her pilots’ reckless, ruthless fighting style, but more than that, Rachel and Melissa had been born for the spotlight—beautiful and brilliant, childhood friends, Melissa shy but charming, Rachel bold and thrilling even through the TV.  Rachel looked incomplete, standing there alone in the empty expanse of the gym as she rained blows down onto a dummy target.

Tobias waited for her to wear out, bracing the bo staff on the floor and leaning on it as she caught her breath, before he cleared his throat.

“What do you want?” she demanded, whirling on him, and Tobias jolted back in alarm before she came up short.  “Oh,” she said more politely.  “I thought you were going to be my cousin.  Or Marco.”

“Who the hell _is_ Marco?” Tobias asked, a little plaintive. 

“Kaiju expert, and resident pain in my fucking ass,” Rachel said.  “You probably know him.  K-science is only like two guys in a room anymore, and the other one’s new.  One of the Shamtuls.”

“Oh,” Tobias said, abruptly connecting this information with _kaiju entrails on my side of the lab, Tobias, it’s disgusting._   “ _That’s_ Marco.”

Rachel nodded and gave him an expectant look.  “And you are?”

“The other Shamtul,” Tobias said dryly, and shifted the file into his other hand, taking a step forward to greet her properly.  “Sorry, I should have introduced myself.  Tobias Shamtul.  The new guy is Ax, my brother.”

“Rachel Berenson, you can call me Rachel,” she said, gripping his hand tightly in hers and shaking it firmly.  There were new scars lacing her left arm, just fading to white—circuit-work, Tobias realized, and kept the revelation carefully off his face.  The mark of a pilot whose Jaeger had been ruined on a drop.  She’d probably earned them just a month ago, when Ursa Flight was wrecked.

“I’d figured that out, actually.”  Tobias smiled a little, and Rachel smirked.  “Listen, I have a file for you--”

“Don’t want it.”  Rachel spun her staff up into a fighting stance and turned back to the heavy bag.  Tobias recognized part of an actual form, this time, rather than just blind violence, and he sighed as he darted around to get back into her line of sight.

“What am I supposed to tell Ax if I come back with this file?”

“That I didn’t want it, obviously,” Rachel said through gritted teeth.

“You don’t want a new partner?”

“Not really.”  Rachel gave a quick toss of her head, knocking her ponytail back and out of her way.  “But I need one.”  A hard series of blows to the bag, and then she stopped, staff still braced as she arched her brows at him.  “You think anyone in that file is going to be able to Drift with me?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Tobias said. 

“Melissa always said,” Rachel started, going back to attacking the bag, “that I was impossible to Drift with.  It’s true.  Excessive aggression.  She and Jake were the only people who could do it.  If they need me back in the field, Jake can get in the Conn-Pod with me.”

“You’re not even going to _look_ at the candidates?” Tobias asked, half-thrusting the file at her.

Rachel paused to give him something that looked a little like a sneer and a little like admiration, and Tobias wondered how often random ‘dome workers stood up to her.  The thought made him stiffen a little bit, even under the weight of her clear blue eyes and sharp tongue.

“Fine,” she said, breaking the silence and looking away.  “You look at them then.”

It took a moment of Tobias standing there, file still held out and lips parted in shock, for him to realize that she was entirely serious.  “Are you—you just want some random guy to pick a partner for you?”

“You’re Elfangor’s kid.  You grew up in Shatterdomes, right?  I’m sure you know what a good match looks like.”  She made a little _get on with it_ sort of gesture, and Tobias shook his head as he flipped open the file.

“What the hell kind of nickname is _TT_ ,” he blurted out without thinking, looking at the first profile.  There was a short choking sound that made him look up, and Rachel was grinning at the heavy bag, biting her lip to keep from laughing.  “Thomas isn’t even that bad a name,” he muttered, looking back down.  “God.  Well,” Tobias continued more thoughtfully, “he has really exceptional combat scores in hand-to-hand, and he’s pretty, if you like the all-American jock look.”

“I get enough of that in my family,” Rachel said.  “What are Terrible Thomas’ drop scores?”

“Um…well,” Tobias said again, skimming down the page and hiding a wince.  They must have been desperate, gambling on TT’s high empathy score to compensate.  “They’re not awful.”

“How bad is it?”

“Uh…how does thirty out of fifty sound?”

Rachel scoffed, dismissive.  “Like a forty percent failure rate.  Who else?”

“There’s a David,” Tobias offered, flipping past TT’s profile.  “His fighting style would match yours pretty well, from the note here, and his drop score--”

“Let me stop you right there,” Rachel said.  “David—rat-faced guy with a smirk?”

“David Pence, but yeah, you could say that.”

“We Drifted once in the Academy,” Rachel said, already shaking her head.  “Kid’s a sociopath.  Probably skins cats in his free time.  Next.”

“Fair enough,” Tobias said.  “There’s another Rachel here, good hand-to-hand, high drop scores—actually, hang on.”  He squinted at the blue post-it note covered with Ax’s typically illegible scrawl.  Somehow, despite being able to write equations that were all but typeset in their perfection, Ax’s regular handwriting was a code in and of itself.  “Says here she used a kitchen knife to pin someone’s uniform shirt to a table.”

“She sounds interesting, at least,” Rachel mused.

“While they were in it,” Tobias added, and grinned a little at the end of Ax’s note.  _Please disregard this candidate as I am submitting her for psychiatric attention when next available._

“Hm.  Maybe not, then.”

“Elena Masters.  Born blind, but excellent drop scores when Drifting and a long list of successful Drift partners.  This girl could Drift with a brick wall, if that’s your concern.”

“You don’t like her?”

Tobias startled, looking up, and made a noncommittal noise.  “Seems nice enough.”

Rachel stopped hitting the heavy bag, braced the bo staff on the floor again, and studied him.  “But?”

“But,” Tobias said reluctantly, “you don’t seem like you do ‘nice.’  And she lacks aggression on the attack.  I’d say that might be useful, opposites attract and all that, but.”  He shrugged.  “She’s most successful on simulations with multiple drops, where she can play defense.”

This time, Rachel didn’t bother to bite her lip, and laughed outright, sounding startled.  “That’s a good call.”

“I’ll hold her as a _maybe_ , I guess,” Tobias said, and Rachel nodded.  Instead of going back to half-ignoring him in favor of the heavy bag, though, she watched him with interest, leaning on the staff, and he tried not to blush as he paged past Elena’s solemn photograph and tabulated statistics.  “There’s one more—oh,” he said, staring down at the picture, a photoshop-pretty face on one side and deep burn scarring on the other.  “I don’t think you know her.”

“Who?” Rachel asked, coming up beside him and leaning in next to him without so much as a pause, as if it was her divine right to take up whatever space she wanted. 

“Taylor,” he said.  “She was in Anchorage with us—me and Ax, I mean.  While he was in school.  A couple years older.  She’s…unique.”

“You don’t like her either.”  Rachel’s confident assessment was much more unnerving at such close range—an accomplishment, Tobias thought vaguely, as it had been quite unnerving before.

“Taylor…well, Taylor _really_ wanted to Drift with a Shamtul,” Tobias said quietly.  “I agreed to try it once—Ax is a lost cause, he doesn’t have the trick of it.  It was a disaster.”

“She’s bad news?”

“She’s…been through a lot,” Tobias said.  “She was angry.”  He swallowed, remembering the feeling of Taylor digging claws deep into his mind, trying to force the Drift open, desperate and hungry and _burning_ with anger.  Her thoughts had been all fire, lacing the edges of his memories as if they were both going to go up in ashes.  Tobias had been half-comatose for almost a full day afterward, and he had dreamed of his father, of Elfangor’s quiet voice and cool hands, like when he had been sick or scared as a child.  “I don’t recommend her,” he told Rachel flatly.

Those clear eyes landed on his face and Tobias had the uncomfortable feeling that they saw much more than he had meant to show.  “Okay,” Rachel said simply.

“She’s…not stable.”

“I believe you.”

Tobias looked back at her, tried to see as much behind the crystal blue of her eyes as she seemed to see behind his own, and there was a moment of silence.

“Um,” he said, glancing away and feeling the back of his neck burn with blood just under the surface.  “I guess that does kind of put you right back where you started, though.  I’m sorry about dragging you through this.”

“No worries,” Rachel said, and when he looked up she was still studying him.  “It was more fun with you here than on my own.  Sorry to dredge up bad memories.”

“Likewise,” Tobias said wryly, folding the file shut and shuffling everything back into place.  “Listen, I’ll go talk to Ax and see if I can find any other candidates, okay?  And maybe meet this elusive K-Science guy.”

“Sure,” Rachel said, eyes unwavering.  “Don’t you have other things to do, though?”

Tobias shrugged.  “I’m mostly here because Ax is here.  I’ve been running errands for three days straight.  I’d be getting people coffee if I knew how to make coffee that didn’t taste like gasoline.”  He waved a little with the file, turning back toward the door—half to leave and half to do _something_ besides stare back at her like a mouse under the eyes of an eagle.  “It was nice to meet you.”

“Hey, Tobias?” she called as he took a few steps away, and he started to turn around just in time to see her make a sharp movement in his peripheral vision.  “Catch.”

The bo staff came at him so quickly it was almost a miracle that he managed to snatch it out of the air without dropping the file.

“What--”

Rachel was advancing on him, spinning her staff lazily as if to limber up, and there was a bright spark like lightning in the cloudless sky of her eyes, teeth bared at him.  “You know the forms, right?”

“Yes,” Tobias said warily, taking a few steps backward.

“Good,” she said, and attacked.

Tobias swallowed a curse and knocked aside her first strike, then her second.  He could feel his wrist trying to give out as he countered her blows with one hand, and dropped under her next swing to give himself enough time to drop the file and fix his grip.

“One,” Rachel said, catching him with a tap on the cheek as he rolled to his feet.

“You’re insane,” Tobias said, and he’d intended it to sound like a revelation, but instead he could have been commenting on the weather—a simple observation of reality.

“Yeah, it’s been said,” Rachel agreed as they reset.  This time Tobias caught her, a gentle touch to her scarred left arm near the shoulder, and she grinned ferociously.  As they reset again, Tobias could feel the old training start to come back to him, his gaze flickering between Rachel’s face and her shoulders, her hips, the placement of her feet. 

When she swept his legs out from under him, he wasn’t surprised, and realized, as he lay breathless on the floor with her staff against his chest, that he was grinning just as wide.

“You’re good,” she observed.

“It’s been a while,” Tobias admitted.  “Two-one.”

And she lunged at him again.

It was walking a road that wasn’t familiar yet, but could be with time—with exposure and practice.  Strike, evade, counterstrike, and again.  It was like flying, Tobias thought dimly as he brought Rachel to the floor and tapped his staff between her shoulders, flying through a clear sky.

“Four-three,” Rachel panted at last as she all-but tackled him outright, landing catlike with her staff braced across his throat, just enough pressure to let him know that he’d lost.

Tobias, panting just as hard, grinned up at her.  “Fair enough.”

“Right,” Rachel said, and stood up, offering him her hand as a burst of applause took them both off guard.  Standing, Tobias realized with a start that they had gathered something of a crowd—a large one.  He could see Ax’s unmistakable mop of curls just past the doors, over Rachel’s shoulder as she clapped a hand around the back of his neck.  She was laughing, brought their heads together to bump her forehead against his, and Tobias felt her drape an arm over his shoulders as they both turned to face the crowd at the door.

“Hey, move, get— _no_ , fuck you _, estamos aqui,_ move _that_ way, we’re trying to get through.”  The man who managed to break free of the crowd was short, with long black hair tied back and stuck through with three different pens, and he had Jake, tall and patiently amused, by the sleeve.  “Rachel, what the fuck?” the man demanded, throwing both arms out.  “Why are you beating up the messenger?”

“He agreed to it!”

“Actually,” Tobias said, “you threw a stick at me and then started hitting me.”

“Yeah,” Rachel said.  “I did do that.  Hey, Jake.”  In the corner of Tobias’ eye, she gave her cousin a model-perfect smile of greeting, and Jake’s face looked well-acquianted with the mix of weary affection and exasperation on it.

“Rachel,” Jake said, eyes flickering down to the file discarded and half-spilled across the floor, “did you at least look through the candidates before you started hitting him?”

She sniffed, leaning on Tobias on one side and her staff on the other like a pair of crutches.  “Sure.  I’ve got a new copilot all picked out.”

The man beside Jake whipped a pen out of his hair and pointed it at Rachel like a wand, his overlarge sweater falling back from his wrists to show an elaborate half-finished tattoo, black ink not yet colored.  Tobias thought it might have been Edriss, the first Cat III kaiju, who had ravaged Baja California and part of the northwestern Mexico coastline to boot before being taken down.

“Was it the crazy one with the knives?” he demanded.  “Because if it was, Shamtul owes me all his dessert rations for like a week.”

A sound escaped Tobias’ throat, somewhere between a laugh and an alarmed yelp.  “Don’t bet him those,” he said once his mouth was cooperating again.  “He steals mine, and then he sulks when I tell him not to.”

The short guy squinted at Tobias, turning his pen on him.  “ _Como te llamas_ , buddy?  How do you know my new lab friend?”  That made the short guy Marco, then, Ax’s partner in K-Science and, apparently, pain in Rachel’s ass.

“This is his brother,” Rachel said, staring Jake down as she gave Tobias a little shake.  “Tobias.  He’s my new copilot.”

Tobias went stiff, every muscle locking up tight as he tried to make it look like this wasn’t a _massive_ shock.  “Rachel,” he said under his breath, and Rachel didn’t bat an eye.

“Can he even Drift?”  Jake’s question wasn’t challenging, just—cautious, Tobias decided numbly, directed at Rachel as if she was likely to select someone on all their characteristics and entirely forget that they would need to be able to maintain the Drift.

“I haven’t in years,” Tobias started, the words cluttering up on his tongue.  “And I don’t—I can’t--”  He closed his hands into fists in order to keep them from shaking.  _Claws, tearing his mind open_.  “I don’t think I can, anymore.  I’m sorry.”

“We can try,” Rachel said, her hand tightening on his shoulder as she stared at her cousin.  “Tomorrow.  If it doesn’t work, all we will have lost is time.  You can even—the girl, Elena Masters.  You can have her on deck for a second test, if Tobias and I can’t Drift.”  Jake’s face didn’t soften, but Rachel seemed to sense weakness, and struck as smoothly as she ever had with the bo staff.  “Please, Jake.  Let me try this.”

Jake studied the pair of them for another minute, then sighed and closed his eyes.  “Fine,” he said, reaching up to rub at the bridge of his nose.  “If he agrees, I’ll get K-Science and Cassie together for a test at 0800 tomorrow.  And I’ll get Masters as a backup.”

Tobias was still reeling when Rachel whirled on him, gripping the fabric of his shirt and locking wide blue eyes on him. 

“Say yes,” she said.  “Please.”

Those blue eyes held Tobias still, and for some reason the only thought that came to mind was that she looked nothing like Taylor.  Their coloring was alike, but Taylor’s lips were thin and set almost cruelly even when she was happy, and her eyes were hard, and her jaw was always tilted at an arrogant angle.  Rachel’s lips were tipped up in what might be the hope of an eventual smile, and her eyes glittered with fading adrenaline, and the confident, stubborn line of her jaw was…friendly.

“Okay,” Tobias said helplessly.  “Tomorrow it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, I am on [Tumblr.](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/)


End file.
